


Cheer Up the Skeleton Prompt Collection

by LadyoftheShield



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Depression, Gen, happiness
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-07
Updated: 2016-02-17
Packaged: 2018-05-18 22:41:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5945989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyoftheShield/pseuds/LadyoftheShield
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Collection for #cheeruptheskeleton on tumblr.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Waking Up

**Author's Note:**

> Goal: Everything is exactly 500 words.

He woke up, vestiges of dead timelines echoing in his brain. For a moment he lay, staring at the ceiling overhead. The ceiling of his house back in Snowdin was black and dappled with silver and blue paint. Papyrus and he had based their image of the stars off the ceiling in Waterfall. But this ceiling (familiar yet not) hung over him, a curtain of dappled grey and white. 

Slowly, he sat up. His new room stood mostly empty now. He’d left most of his scientific equipment back in Snowdin (to stem questions he didn’t know how to answer, and doubted he ever would have to). The clock on his paper-covered desk read 8:14. That was the thing about the surface, he thought. The sun wouldn’t answer to anyone. it just did its own thing, indifferent to anything that happened on the surface. Or below it..

As he did every morning, he checked the log under his pillow. Eight resets, to his memory. The multiverse-defying properties of the paper brought the tips of his carpals alive with tingling as he refreshed his memory of what he’d recorded.

Eight timelines. Eight resets, in this dimension anyway. He closed the notebook and slipped it back under his pillow before the strange sensation of feeling began to hurt his carpals.

Standing up, Sans pulled on a clean shirt and slipped his feet into the white slippers by his bed. Somedays, he was a sneaker guy, when there would be a lot of running and the sun shone down bright onto them and Frisk was feeling like their name.

The sunlight streamed violently through his window, but he didn’t feel he had it in him to run around today. The problem with the notebook is that even though the data within remained intact, it was worthless if he didn’t write in it. Some timelines he’d coded in there retroactively (when Frisk chose to bear the knife and everyone fell around him, feeling anything more than his emotions was unbearable) and others he couldn’t remember at all. But the notebook didn’t lie.

(Yet Gaster could have)

Laughter from the kitchen drifted up the stairs, mingled with the sharp scent of baking cinnamon pastries and frying bacon. Mustering the energy to move, Sans started down the stairs. He was lucky that skeleton skulls came in permanent grins. Even on a good day where everyone was alive, he didn’t always feel it.

Down the stairs he went, his carpals tracing along the bannister as he went. Dustless. Spotless. You could never tell anything had been any different.

Frisk was waiting at the bottom. For a moment, Sans and the child looked at each other in silence. Then Frisk lifted their hands up. Eight fingers. Eight resets. 

Something hitched, then released. He didn’t ask how Frisk knew. Frisk always knew.

*Come on, kiddo. Let’s see what Tori’s bacon,” he said, winking at the child.

After a pause, Frisk laughed. And Sans didn’t have to force his, either.


	2. Games

“I know you’re hiding somewhere! Come out and admit defeat, human!”

Frisk giggled as they ran down the hall and ducked in the closet. From his post in the hall, Sans heard the door click shut, then the slightly muffled sounds of shifting boxes.

“You might want to try the lamp next time, buddy,” Sans said as Papyrus ran into the hallway, coming to a stop right next to the closet.. 

“Sans! You didn’t even hide!” Papyrus complained, crossing his arms. “I’ll count again- and you better move this time!”

“OK, Papy,” Sans said, watching his brother stalk down the hall.

“One! Two!” Papyrus began.

Sans took two steps back and ducked under the stairwell. The noises from the closet had ceased. 

“Fifteen! Sixteen!”

There was another crash from inside the closet. The door creaked open and Frisk peered out.

“Better hurry, kid,” Sans said with a wink.

Hesitating, Frisk ducked back inside. Another crash sounded, distinctly flavored with breaking glass.

With a yelp, Frisk darted out into the hall.

“Twenty-five! Twenty-six!”

With a sigh, Sans reached out and touched the human’s soul. Frisk yelped again as Sans pulled them up to the ceiling, and hung them there.

“Twenty nine! Thirty! Ready or not, here I come!”

More loud footsteps. Papyrus was more than capable of stealth, he simply didn’t see the need for it very often. Closing his eyes, Sans leaned back and pillowed his hands behind his head.

“Saaans! Human! Come out, come out- Saaaans!”

Cracking his right eye open, he glanced up at Papyrus. “‘Sup.”

“Oh my god, why do I even try!” Papyrus sighed. Marching over to the closet, he opened the door and rummaged around inside for a moment, oblivious to the mountain of junk that fell out and pooled around his ankles.

“I found it!”

Papyrus jumped away from the closet with a triumphant cry.

“I thought we were playing hide and seek,” Sans said. His grip on Frisk was holding, but he knew if he kept it up for long, he’d start getting tired.

“It’s your turn to seek once I find Frisk, Sans,” Papyrus said, setting something on the side table. “So get up and get ready, lazybones!”

“You don’t have tibia in such a hurry,” Sans said, winking his right eye at his brother..

Papyrus started up the stairs. “Friiiisk! Come out I will find you!” 

Once he heard the master bedroom door open, Sans let Frisk down gently. “Better make a run for it, kiddo.”

Frisk moved over to the side table, then crawled in next to him, squeezing between Sans and the wall. “Whatcha got there, kiddo?” Sans asked, Leaning against Sans, they pressed the thing Papyrus had been excited to find into his carpals.

It was a small clay Mettaton. Sans closed his fingers around it, and remembered making it for his brother, back before either of them had jobs, before they had a home or growth plates. 

“OH MY GOD, SANS!” Upstairs, Papyrus finally got the joke.


	3. Prompt: Outdoors

He’d had little thought for stars when they first emerged from the Underground. There were other things that occupied his time, other things to worry about (Keeping Gaster at bay, determining if this was a True end or not, making sure Papyrus didn’t blindly trust every human he came across) and his star watching hobby had been firmly placed in a cupboard.

Sans had seen the stars overhead, sometimes, as he walked Frisk back from whatever extra curricular activity of the week they’d decided to participate in, or as he’d lain awake in his bed staring out the window out at the vast, unending expanse of the sky.

Of course, nothing was unending. The sky, big as it seemed, was no exception.

But as he began to, somewhat against his will, settle into his new life, Sans noticed that the stars moved. 

It wasn’t perceptible night from night. But after a couple weeks, or a month, it was clear that they had shifted from their original positions in the sky. A small thing, perhaps, but it set him on edge nevertheless.

So one windy night, he dusted his rusty telescope off and dragged it back up from the underground. Sans had taken only what was necessary from the underground when they left, and didn’t mind returning as needed. The long walk gave him time to think, and while he could never resent the full house after so many dusty days alone, time to himself was a rarity these days unless he claimed it.

He heard his brother coming outside long before he got close. Papyrus was very capable of stealth, but only when he actively tried. 

“Sans, you still haven’t moved your socks!”

“My socks aren’t toe-tally in your way, are they?” Sans asked, making another note in his journal. He really needed to invest in a pair of gloves, he thought. Prolonged contact with his scientific log brought strange, unpleasant sensation to his carpals. How did humans go through their daily lives with so many nerve endings?

Making a disgusted noise, Papyrus came up behind him, but said nothing more. Grass crunched, nearly drowned by clicking bone as Papyrus sat down. Briefly Sans considered asking him what he wanted, then let the thought go. 

“Did you know the humans have stories for the pictures they paint in the stars?”

Slowly, Sans turned to his brother. “No,” he said. “Do humans know the stars move?”

“Oh yes,” Papyrus chirped, “well, actually the stars don’t move. The earth is spinning, and that makes the stars seem to rotate.”

“...You learned that when you went to school with the human for show and tell, didn’t you?” Sans asked, setting down his journal and shaking feeling out of his carpals.

“Yes!” Papyrus said, “I also that learned humans have names for all the star pictures!”

“What pictures?” Sans asked, sitting next to his brother.

Papyrus pointed. “See those lines?”

“Yeah,” he said as he leaned against Papyrus. 

“Those are the Gemini, the brothers...”


End file.
